


Waiting, wishing, forgetting (the blessed are the forgetful remix)

by pamymex3girl



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 10:44:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4176894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pamymex3girl/pseuds/pamymex3girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donna waits for something she can never quite name nore remember. Post end of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting, wishing, forgetting (the blessed are the forgetful remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Maribor_Petrichor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maribor_Petrichor/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Blessed Are The Forgetful](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1412956) by [Maribor_Petrichor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maribor_Petrichor/pseuds/Maribor_Petrichor). 



> Written for the remix redux 15. I hope I remixed this story correctly. And I really, really hope that the auther of the original story likes this one. Also I wish I was better at naming my stories.

Donna waits.

For what she does not know, nor is she particularly certain it matters. It should matter, this waiting, because it’s a part of her, but she’s not sure it ever will, nor ever has. This is what she knows, truly knows, she is waiting for something she can’t quite name or remember. All alone, in her grand house which is the envy of all her former friends – friends who never call nor invite her, friends who keep asking her why she is the way she is. It’s a part of her, this waiting, and she wishes desperately that it would make some kind of sense, but it never does.

Perhaps she is going crazy.

Perhaps she has completely lost her mind.

She’s been feeling like this – like she’s lost something and is waiting for it to return, though she’s not sure what it is supposed to be – for years. Since before the wedding, since before she met Shaun. Once, years ago, right after the wedding, she’d told her grandfather, desperately trying to find the words to describe what it was that she was feeling. She never quite found them, never quite found the way to describe what it was that she felt, but she feels, somehow that he had understood her anyway. He’d looked at her with sad knowing eyes and just listened. But she’d felt, deep inside her, that he had known exactly what it was that she was waiting for. But she’d been afraid of his answer, knowing also that he would lie. And there had been a voice, deep inside, that told her that knowing would be worse.

So she’d let the silence fill the room and hadn’t asked.

*

Shaun was always happy.

Always happy, always sweet, always, no matter what she said, on her side. He’d had so many things he’d wanted to do, plans and schemes she didn’t quite share but agreed to anyway. She’d wanted him to be happy and she knows he is, now, now that he is living his own life without her. But in the early days of their marriage Donna had felt like she could make him happy, and if she could make _him_ happy than she would be happy too, and she could stop waiting. But life very rarely goes the way we want it to go, the way we wish for it to go, and they’d fallen apart faster than even she could have predicted.

Now Donna knows that they could never have been happy.

Now she knows they couldn’t have worked.

In what universe, after all, was sweet and amicable compatible with her?

*

The day of her first guitar lessons she’d destroyed her guitar.

Just smashed it to bits on a bus bench not far from where she took her lessons. She’s quite lucky that nobody saw her, that it was a time of day when that particular street was deserted. If someone had seen her she’s certain she would have ended up in the nut house, talking to psychiatrists trying to determine why she’d felt to need to smash her new guitar to pieces. They’d call her crazy, especially when she could not explain why it was that she’d done it. Why she’d felt the desperate need to stop the source of that sound immediately.

It had been unearthly and screechy and so familiar it broke her heart.

She can’t explain why.

Just that the sound her guitar strings made had been so achingly familiar she’d at first wanted to make it again. But then the sadness had become overwhelming and she’d almost started to cry. And she could not, for the live of her, explain _why._ All she’d known, in that moment, was that she had to destroy the source or the sadness would crush her.

So she did.

She never took another music lesson.

And yet, deep inside, there is a part of her that wants to hear that sound again, despite the sadness.

She wishes she knew why.

*

After the guitar incident she went to a psychiatrist.

Desperate to stop feeling the way she was. The man had been kind enough, listening to her babbling, and then he’d started talking about post-divorce depression. He’d though she was being hysterical, just another woman who couldn’t deal with her husband leaving. But then she hadn’t told him everything, hadn’t told him she’d felt like this before she got married, hadn’t told him about the guitar incident or the waiting for something she could not explain.

He’d prescribed her pills that did not help and gave her a brochure for a ladies group she never went to.

(She never went back.)

No matter how hard she tried, and she did, she couldn’t call him doctor.

He hadn’t minded.

*

Her grandfather had always believed she could be more.

Always pushed her, always telling her I know you can be more, better. She’d tell him that she couldn’t, that she wasn’t smart enough to be anything more, that she wasn’t anything special. And he’d look at her with those sad knowing eyes and he’d say 'You're wrong, you are special.' (The words had been achingly familiar, like someone, somewhere had said them to her before. Though she could not quite remember who or even when.) The whay he had said those words had made her believe that he knew something about her that she did not, something she perhaps had not quite discovered yet. 

She’d always thought _someday I’ll ask him._

And then he’d died.

Beyond the grief, which was crushing, she’d felt like she’d lost something more. Like she’d lost her last connection to something else, though she doesn’t know what that something else is. All she knows is that she feels like something had completely broken, between them, inside her. She couldn’t explain it, couldn’t put it into words, and the one person who might have been able to help her make sense of it was gone.

*

The church had been packed at her grandfather’s funeral.

Shaun had been there, of course, and old friends of hers that hadn’t called in years. There had been friends and acquaintances of both her grandfather and her mother. And yet, despite the amount of people that were there, Donna had felt like something was missing. Like there was somebody out there that should be there, that should be sharing in this grief, but she doesn’t know who that could possibly be.

And then, at the cemetery, she’d seen him.

A young man standing a little apart from the rest of them. He’d looked sad, just as sad as she’d felt, and for a moment Donna had thought she’d known him. But then she realized that she didn’t, that this man standing there was a complete stranger and she had no idea how her grandfather even knew him. And yet despite that, despite never been able to tell who he was, she’d felt like finally everyone was there. Like whoever had been missing at the church had finally arrived and her grandfather could be buried surrounded by everyone he had ever cared about.

It didn’t make sense.

She’d told herself that once it was over she would walk over to him and ask him his name and how he had known her grandfather.

But by the time she’d been able to, he’d been gone.

*

She’d bought the stars on a Saturday, just a few weeks after the funeral.

Two stars, right next to each other, somewhere in the night’s sky. Her name and his, together in the stars, forever a part of something more.

As she lay in her bed underneath her skylight she’d pretend she could see them.

Side by side.

A part of the universe forever.

*

Donna waits.

Donna wishes.

As she lies in her bed staring up at the beautiful sky, she waits and wishes for something she can never quite name. And she wonders what her life would be like if she could just forget all the mistakes she’d made. How nice her life would be then.

She waits.

Nothing ever comes.

She never forgets.


End file.
